My little project on using a laptop LCD connected to a beagleboard for displaying sheet music and other MIDI software.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

The project is still going!

So today following the announcement that the Hackaday Prize contest is closing within the following 12 hours, I decided to submit the project to the contest and update the blog. Why not? Maybe I'll finally have some readers!

I haven't been allocating much time to the project since my last blog entry, however I do have some worthy updates.

I received a 15 inch touchscreen panel that I ordered from ebay, it came from Hong Kong and it took nearly a month to arrive. The packaging was a bit funny but .. hey, it arrived intact!

The touchscreen is detected in Linux as

0eef:0001 D-WAV Scientific Co., Ltd eGalax TouchScreenand works using the USB touchscreen driver in the kernel (CONFIG_TOUCHSCREEN_USB_COMPOSITE). I'll need to check later how to make the touchscreen device available as a X11 input (tslib)?
I also studied a bit which MCU to use for the project. There are quite a few places comparing the most common development boards for hobbyists. I was aiming for the Beaglebone Black but it was out of stock in most stores around here, so I ended up buying a Raspberry Pi. There are some reports of people running pulseaudio and midi software on it, so it should fit my needs. The Raspberry Pi also has support for a multitude of output resolutions which is important for me since I'm using a 14'' screen.

I would be already cross-compiling a Gentoo-based distribution for the Raspberry Pi if my laptop wasn't broken. After 5 years, my dv6535ep died with a burnt GPU (it is funny since I don't even game on it). I successfully brought it alive once using my hot air station but the GPU ended up failing again a few days later. Anyway, this is subject of another story!

So now I'm preparing the desktop for development since the laptop was my dev computer :'( I'm hoping in having more updates soon.